Patients often must provide new or updated medical information to doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers when they seek medical attention. Providing this information is time-consuming and subject to errors and omissions. Obtaining medical information from patients that have been involved in accidents or are otherwise unable to provide the information themselves is particularly difficult. In fact, ambulance operators, firefighters, and other first responders often report that the biggest problem they face is obtaining medical information from unresponsive accident victims.
To alleviate some of these problems, some people with diagnosed medical conditions and/or allergies wear bracelets or dog tags that describe their medical conditions or allergies. Unfortunately, these devices only provide the most basic medical information and are not easily updated. Many electronic medical record-keeping solutions have also been adopted and/or proposed to alleviate some of these problems, but known electronic solutions are either too complicated for practical use, limited to particular proprietary software, and/or limited in other respects.